Rexx & THE Editor

To install in Ubuntu just type this in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install regina-rexx the

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Opengl & SDL in Ubuntu

After you've installed Ruby in Ubuntu, you'll want to update Rubygems & install some more software.

First to update Rubygems, type the following in a terminal.

sudo gem update --system

If you get an error such as...

Attempting remote update of rubygems-update
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
Could not find rubygems-update (> 0) in any repository

Just run the update command again, it should work after a few attempts.

Now type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Now type this...

sudo gem install rake

Now enter this...

sudo gem install mkrf

Now this...

sudo apt-get install rake

Also type this...

sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev

Type this in also...

sudo gem install ruby-opengl

Now install SDL...

 sudo apt-get install libsdl-ruby1.8

Finally install Rubygame...

sudo gem install rubygame

Ubuntu Ruby Install

If you want to install Ruby in Ubuntu, just type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 ruby1.8 rubygems

Tile Map Editor

I found a post here on the Basic4GL forum which contained a useful link to a Tile Map Editor called Mappy.

Ubuntu File Limit

Interesting post here on the Ubuntu Forum about increasing the number of files that can be opened at any one time.

Paint.NET Plugins

Paint.NET along with 'The GIMP' is One of my favourite painting applications. Here is a link to the official paint.NET forum, which is where you can download a lot of useful plugins. Installing the plugins is extremely simple but there are instructions on the site for anyone who needs them.

Useful WMP Codecs

Need to watch films with the xvid.avi file extension? Then download Xvid from here.

If you need to watch films with the divx.avi extension, download DivX from here.

If you want to watch YouTube .flv videos, download PlayFLV from here.

If you have a film which has a subtitles .srt file, download VobSub from here.

Documentary about Elite

Interesting documentary about the computer game 'Elite' which was released on the BBC Microcomputer in the nineteen-eighties can be downloaded from here.

The short 30 minute documentary is designed to be viewed in WMP & you might need to upgrade your player in order to deal with the DRM content.

Digital Mars Success

After spending a lot of time messing about with Digital Mars, I've finally managed to get some OpenGL - SDL programs to compile & run.

I'll be making some posts on my Wikispace later, which will show you how I managed to compile the programs.

Code::Blocks Ubuntu Installation

I was recently browsing through the Ubuntu Forums & discovered a new way of installing Code::Blocks. Read this forum post for more details.

Tomb Raider: Underworld Trailer

It's looking very good & they've also brought back some of the characters who were in Tomb Raider: Legend.

rubyscript2exe bug

Creating an .exe in Ruby is a pretty simple task if you use rubyscript2exe. Recently however a problem has occurred where whenever you try to create an .exe you get the following message.

A bug report has been filed on the Ruby bug tracker by the man who wrote rubyscript2exe & there is also a discussion on comp.lang.ruby here.

Apparently some people encountered a similar issue with rubyscript2exe back in 2007 & another post was made here about it.

Try searching for the following on Google: "Couldn't execute this command (rc=256):"

Installing AbiWord for Ubuntu

If you need a lightweight word-processor for Ubuntu, just type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install abiword-common abiword-plugins

Java JDK for Ubuntu

If you want to install the Java JDK for Ubuntu just type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

Geany for Ubuntu

Geany is an IDE for Windows & Linux that can be used for various programming languages.

If you want to install the Ubuntu version just type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install geany

DrPython for Ubuntu

If you want to install the Python IDE; DrPython for Ubuntu.

Just type the following in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install drpython

Java Test

Want to know whether or not you've got the latest version of the JRE installed?

Go here, if you see the dancing Duke logo you've got Java installed.

If you haven't got it installed I suggest you download it from here.

Club Nintendo

Back in the early nineteen-nineties I was a member of Club Nintendo. This meant that every 4 months I'd get a magazine through the post. Sadly by the mid nineties Club Nintendo had ceased to exist. Recently however I discovered (when I brought my Nintendo DS) that Club Nintendo has been restarted. Now when you buy a Nintendo product you get points which you can exchange for gifts, you can find more out here.

Irrlicht Game

A friend of mine recently wrote a game for a 12 hour coding jam using Irrlicht & IrrKlang. It currently only supports 2 players & can be downloaded from here.

RAR Decompression in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install rar

Irrlicht & IrrKlang

Irrlicht is a free graphics engine that can be used to develop your own games. IrrKlang is a free music library that you use to add music to your games. Both are multi format & can be used in many different Operating Systems.

KMPlayer

The KMPlayer is one of the best media players available. In fact I think that it's the only media player that can deal with the .nsv format. The new version can be downloaded from here, I suggest you get the 1432 R2 build.

Wikispaces Live Changes Badge

Last Month I discovered that the Live Changes Badge on my Wikispace wasn't displaying correctly. I spent some time searching on other peoples wikispaces & quickly found that wherever a Badge had been implemented it wasn't displaying correctly. So I sent an E-Mail to Wikispaces to tell them about the matter & now a Month later the problem has been fixed. Apparently there was a problem in the HTML that is used to post the badge. When wikispaces gets updated the correct code for the badges will be uploaded, so all the display problems will be fixed.

Graphics Programming Black Book

The entire book can be downloaded from here. I advice that you use a download manager such as FDM because you have to download more than 70 chapters. You should also download the Gios PDF splitter & merger, it's 100% free & can combine all the separate chapters into one book.

Visualizing Primes in 2D

Nice webpage here on the subject.

NetBeans Bug Feature

Have you ever had that annoying problem in NetBeans where you're compiling a program & the additional files that your project depends on don't get copied?

It happens to me quite often when I'm building a JOGL application. The program will require the JOGL dlls & JOGL jar files which can be found on my CLASSPATH & in the NetBeans libraries. But when I clean & build my app I'll get the following message.

Not copying the libraries.

This is because NetBeans will only copy jar files to the lib folder that your app depends on. If you try & copy any .dll, .so or .class files they won't get copied. You can find more information about this 'feature' at the following links, here, here & here.

Windows Command Prompt Help

Need help using the Windows Command Prompt?

• This page lists the full commands for the prompt.
• An overview of what the Command Prompt does, can be found here.
  

Programming with Objects

This is the section of the PowerBASIC forum dedicated to Object Oriented Programming.

Mathematical Curves

An interesting site here, dedicated to mathematical curves.

Java Examples

A lot of source-code for Java programs can be found here.

Compile a Java .exe

Want to create an executable file from a Java application?

Look here & here.

Lode's Computer Graphics Tutorial

Very useful graphics related site can be found here.

Sprite Masking

Some interesting links regarding sprite masking.

• Post submitted to SDL mailing list.
• Sprite masking in Liberty BASIC, link.
• Wikipedia article on sprite masking, here.
  

Off Topic Post

TNA: King of the Mountain 2005

TNA King Of The Mountain 2

Bittorrent for Ubuntu

If you need a Bittorrent client for Ubuntu, just open a terminal & type in the following.

sudo apt-get install bittorrent-gui

Project Euler

Is a site dedicated to solving mathematical problems, you can check it out here.

People use a lot of different programming languages to solve the problems.

Here are the solutions to the first 40 problems in Python. Here are the first five in Ruby (I think). Finally here are some more different solutions in Python.

STATIC Variables

Interesting thread on the thinBasic forum about STATIC variables here.

PowerBASIC OOP Support

Support for Object-oriented programming is soon to be added to PowerBASIC.

Is that good news or bad?

Why not decide for yourself by reading this thread on the PowerBASIC forum?

There's another thread which may interest you here.

Panda3D - Free 3D Engine

I came across this thread on the Ubuntu forum today. It had originally been started way back in 2005 but recently someone had added a post to it.

Panda3D is a 3D engine for Python & it looks very promising, I haven't had time to try it out yet. But I'll post again when I've tried some of the examples.

IrfanView Download

IrfanView is an image viewer which can be downloaded from here. If you want to view even more image formats than I suggest you download the IrfanView plug-ins as well.

Search Engines

Here are some useful visual search engines.

• viewzi
• Cuil
• Searchme

Here is a link to metacrawler, which is a great search engine which uses other search engines to find information.

Help with Pointers

If you've just started using C or C++ you may need some help understanding what 'Pointers' are & how you use them. So here are some useful links.

• A discussion about pointers on the Ubuntu forum, here.
• An introduction to pointers, here.
• Another pointer tutorial here.
  

Linux Awk Example

Here is a 'Hello World!' example written using Awk in Linux. You can compare it to this example for Windows.

awk 'BEGIN { print "Hello world!" }'

Useful AWK Links

Here are some useful links which will help you in learning AWK.

• This is a link to the AWK page on Wikipedia.
• The GAWK manual is here.
• A link to a forum post which solved a problem I was having.
  

AWK Windows Examples

Okay, here's the first; a simple Hello world example.

awk "BEGIN { print \"Hello world!\" }"

The above program will print Hello world! on the screen.

Linux users should notice the use of double quotation marks at the beginning & end of the script. Also notice how the quotations in the braces have had to be 'cancelled-out' with backslashes.

If anyone wants to know why I've become interested in Awk, it was based on me reading this thread on the Ubuntu Forum.

AWK, GAWK, MAWK etc...

I'd been hearing about 'awk' for a longtime on the Ubuntu forum. It's a simple command-line tool that you can use for searching through text files. I've just downloaded the Windows version which can be found here.

The biggest difference between the Linux version & the Windows version so far has been in how you enter quotation marks for the tasks.

Single for Linux '
Double for Windows "

I'll try & post some usage examples later on.

Off Topic Post

Anyone like myself who has ever read any Erich von Daniken books or Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, will have heard about the 'Antikythera Mechanism'. You can watch a very informative video about it here.

You can also watch a lot of the 'Arthur C. Clarke Mysterious World' television shows here.

Here is a full episode of the show which deals with strange crystal skulls & the Antikythera Mechanism.

Useful Java Fact

I was browsing through the Ubuntu Programming Forum today & found a very useful piece of information regarding the Java programming language.

Java only uses 32MB of RAM, if you need more you can specify it on the command line.

java -Xmx512m myClass

The above command will increase the memory available to your program to 512MB.

The forum thread where I found this information out can be found here.